Homecoming: Vidrine native, SHS alum Aguillard accepts coaching gig

By: RHETT MANUEL
Sports Editor

VILLE PLATTE — When you’re young, the dream is always to get away from where you grew up.
Especially if you live in a small town, the journey of life often takes you to different destinations in an attempt to find yourself.
In most cases, your heart ultimately brings you back where you started and you settle back in where you began.
That appears to be the case for Jacob Aguillard, a 2013 graduate of Sacred Heart. After stops at Crowley High, St. Edmund’s in Eunice and Iota, Aguillard was announced as the next head football coach and athletic director at Sacred Heart on Monday via a social media post.
Aguillard received a Kinesiology degree from LSU in 2016 and a master’s in educational leadership in 2022.
Primarily a defensive coach, Aguillard will get a crack at running a program in his image at the school he calls home.
It was ultimately the factor that most swayed him to come back to the Halls of Troy.
“It’s home,” he said. “You always want to come back home and make a difference. I always told myself that if the right situation came about and the timing was right, then yes I’d be interested. That happened to be right now.
Aguillard, a husband and father of two boys, went through the process and ultimately convinced the search committee he was the man for the job after a process that he described as fairly routine.
“Of course you had the application process of applying by a certain date. After that, I was contacted by the search committee and talked with (principal) Dawn (Shipp) briefly.
“We then went through the interview process as usual. It was straight-forward, not long and drawn out in any way.”
Aguillard succeeds Josh Harper in the same position.
Harper did a good job of establishing routines and structure in his eight-year tenure at Sacred Heart. Aguillard, stepping into his first head coaching job and respecting the ground work laid out by Harper doesn’t plan to change much immediately.
“You never want to go in and make big changes with teenagers,” he said. “I think the blueprint is good here. It’s been successful, but ultimately we can add things to build our own culture after the things Coach Harper laid out for us.”
Aguillard, on top of his responsibilities with overseeing the football program and the athletic department as a whole, also intends to assist coaching boys and girls’ track.
Aguillard is excited about what the situation he is inheriting.
“The administration, Father Tom, Mrs. Dawn. There are a lot of familiar faces.
“In terms of the team, I watched a game to see what we had coming back. I wanted to see the structure of it all, from a football perspective. I know the facilities, they’re first-class. When you saw it all, the facilities and the film, it made me want to come home and help build the school, the football department and the athletic department.”
Aguillard’s vision for the future of Sacred Heart athletics not only involves on-field success, but also falls in line with the overarching vision of the both the school and the Roman Catholic Church.
“We want to bring state championships to Sacred Heart,” he said. “I think any coach who doesn’t tell you that is wasting their time. But, we want to grow young men and women in the Catholic faith and grow them up as productive members of society.
“We want to build it in this way — the faith, then academics and then athletics. When we start to build those three things, then I think you’ll see championships come back to Sacred Heart.”